"Do they know mademoiselle?"

"Indeed, yes! They are the best of her very few friends. But--the Atlantic rolls between."

Chester went out. In the rear door Ovide's wife appeared, knitting.

"Any close-ter?" she asked over her silver-bowed spectacles.

"Some," he said, taking down _Poole's Index_.

She came to his side and they placidly conversed. As she began to leave him, "No," she said, "we kin wish, but we mustn' meddle. All any of us want' or got any rights to want is to see 'em on speakin' terms.

F'om dat on, hands off. Leave de rest to de fitness o' things, de everlast'n' fitness o' things!"

VII

At the Castanados', the second evening after, Chester was welcomed into a specially pretty living-room. But he found three other visitors.

Madame, seated on a sort of sofa for one, made no effort to rise. Her face, for all its breadth, was sweet in repose and sweeter when she spoke or smiled. Her hands were comparatively small and the play of her vast arms was graceful as she said to a slim, tallish, comely woman with an abundance of soft, well-arranged hair:

"Seraphine, allow me to pres-ent Mr. Chezter."

She explained that this Mme. Alexandre was her "neighbor of the next door," and Chester remembered her sign: "Laces and Embroideries."

"Scipion," said Castanado to a short, swarthy, broad-bearded man, "I have the honor to make you acquaint' with my friend Mr. Chezter."

Chester pressed the enveloping hand of "S. Beloiseau, Artisan in Ornamental Iron-work."

"Also, Mr. Chezter, Mr. Rene Ducatel; but with him you are already acquaint', I think, eh?"

Chester shook hands with a small, dapper, early-gray, superdignified man, recalling his sign: "Antiques in Furniture, Gla.s.s, Bronze, Plate, China, and Jewelry." M. Ducatel seemed to be already taking leave.

His "anceztral 'ome," he said, was far up-town; he had dropped in solely to borrow--showing it--the _Courrier des Etats-Unis_.

That journal, Castanado remarked to Chester as at a corner table he poured him a gla.s.s of cordial, brought the war, the trenches, the poilu and the boche closer than any other they knew. Beloiseau and Mme.

Alexandre, he softly explained, had come in quite unlooked-for to discuss the great strife and might depart at any moment. Then the reading!

But Chester himself interested those two and they stayed. When he said that Beloiseau's sidewalk samples had often made him covet some excuse for going in and seeing both the stock and the craftsman, "That was excuse ab-undant!" was the prompt response, and Castanado put in:

"Scipion he'd rather, always, a non-buying connoisseur than a buying Philistine."

"Come any day! any hour!" said Beloiseau.

Presently all five were talking of the surviving poetry of both artistic and historic Royal Street. "Twenty year' ag-o," said the ironworker, "looking down-street from my shop, there was not a building in sight without a romantic story. My G.o.d! for example, that Hotel St.

Louis!"

Chester--"had heard one or two of its episodes only the evening before, at that up-town dinner, from a fine old down-town Creole, a fellow guest, with whom he was to dine the next week."

"Aha-a-a! precizely ac-rozz the street from Mme. Alexandre!" said the hostess. "M'sieu' et Madame De l'Isle! Now I detec' that!"

"Have they no son?--or--or daughter?" he asked.

"Not any," Mme. Alexandre broke in with a significant sparkle; "juz'

the two al-lone."

"They live over my shop," Beloiseau said. "You muz' know that double gate nex' adjoining me."

"Oh, that lovely piece of ironwork? I took that for a part of your establishment."

"I have only the uze of it with them. My _grandpere_ he made those gate', for the father of Mme. De l'Isle, same year he made those great openwork gate' of Hotel St. Louis. You speak of episode'! One summer, renovating that hotel, they paint' those gate'--of iron openwork--in imitation--_mon Dieu_!--of marbl'! _Ciel_! the tragedy of _that_!

Yes, they live over me; in the whole square, both side' the street, last remaining of the 'igh society."

When Mme. Alexandre finally rose to go, and had kissed the upturned brow of her hostess, she went by an inner door and rear balcony. And when Chester and Beloiseau began to take leave their host said to Chester:

"You dine with M. De l'Isle Tuesday. Well, if you'll come again here the next evening we'll attend to--that business."

"Wouldn't that be losing time? I can just as well come sooner."

"No," said madame, "better that Wednesday."

Chester was nettled, but he recovered when the ironworker walked with him around into Bienville Street and at his _pension_ door lamented the pathetic decay of the useful arts and of artistic taste, since the advent of castings and machinery. The pair took such liking for each other's tenets of beauty, morals, art, and life that Chester walked back to the De l'Isle gates, and their parting at last was at the corner half-way between their two domiciles.

Meanwhile madame was saying to her spouse, "Aha! you see? The power of prayer! Ab-ove all, for the he'pless! By day the fo' corner' of my room, by night the fo' post' of my bed, are----"

"Yes, _cherie_, I know."

"Yes, they're to me for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John! Since three days every time I heard the cathedral clock I've prayed to them; and now----!"

"Well, my angel? Now?"

"Well, now! He's dining there next Tuesday!"

"Truly. Yet even now we can only hope----"

"Ah, no! Me, I can also continue to supplicate! From now till Wednesday, every time that clock, I'll pray those four _evangelistes_!

and Thursday you'll see--the power of prayer! Oh, 'tis like _magique_, that power of prayer!"

VIII

On Tuesday evening Chester, a country boy yet now and then, was first at the De l'Isles'.

Madame lauded him. "Punctualitie! tha'z the soul of pleasure!" She had begun to explain why her other guests included but one young lady, when here they came. First, the Prieurs, a still handsome Creole couple whom he never met again. Then that youthful-aged up-town pair, the Thornd.y.k.e-Smiths. And last--while Smith held Chester captive to tell him he knew his part of Dixie, having soldiered there in the Civil War--the one young lady, Mlle. Chapdelaine. As Chester turned toward her she turned away, but her back view was enough to startle him.

"Aline," the hostess began as she brought them face to face, but whatever she said more might as well have been a thunderbolt through the roof. For Aline Chapdelaine was SHE.

They went out together. What a stately dining-room! What carvings!

What old china and lace on the board, under what soft, rich illumination! The Prieurs held the seats of honor. Chester was on the hostess's left. Mademoiselle sat between him and Mr. Smith. It would be pleasant to tell with what poise the youth and she dropped into conversation, each intensely mindful--intensely aware that the other was mindful--of that Conti Street corner, of Ovide's shop, and of "The Clock in the Sky," and both alike hungry to know how much each had been told about the other. Calmly they ignored all earlier encounter and entered into acquaintance on the common ground of the poetry of the narrow region of decay in which this lovely home lay hid "like a lost jewel."